The 2015 Bampton Lectures in America will be given by Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin, speaking on: A Genealogy for Judaism. In this series of lectures, Daniel Boyarin proposes that scholarship ought to resist using the term “Judaism” with reference to the pre-modern period. As has been argued by several scholars already, there is no “native” term with this meaning in antiquity or the Middle Ages. There is, moreover, no evidence that Jews divided off one … read more

Winnie Wong's recently published book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (U Chicago Press, 2014), has been awarded the 2015 Joseph Levenson Prize (post-1900 China) by the Association of Asian Studies. Van Gogh on Demand was also named one of the Top 10 Art Books of 2014 by Hyperallergic. Join Winnie Wong at a Townsend Center book chat to discuss the work on April 22, 2015, 12-1pm at 220 Stephens Hall.

Trinh T. Minh-ha will be giving the keynote address, "The Politics of Form and Forces," at an international film series event, "A Celebration of Women Filmmakers: International Perspectives, Gendered Lenses," hosted by the Department of Languages and Literatures at Mills College in Oakland. The lecture will be followed by the screening of her digital film, NIGHT PASSAGE (108 mins) with Q&A afterwards.
Wednesday, March 4 at 6 pm
Department of Languages … read more

The Art of Writing program will prepare students to think clearly and to express themselves—particularly through their writing—lucidly, directly, and elegantly, in a variety of writing modes representing various disciplinary approaches. At the same time, the program is designed to broaden the professional development of doctoral candidates by providing them the opportunity to be mentored in the art and skill of teaching writing, which also involves learning how to be excellent … read more

From the UC Berkeley News Center:
BERKELEY — UC Berkeley’s Judith Butler was awarded the insignia of the French Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters this week for her contributions in philosophy, ethics and political and literary theories.
Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Berkeley’s Program of Critical Theory, where she served as founding director, received the formal honor from Consul General Pauline Carmona at … read more

Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. And yet, from ancient times to the present, they have often sharply diverged, both in their approach to these questions and in their relationship to one another. Moreover, the vast differences among individual writers, historical periods, and languages pose challenges for anyone wishing to understand the relationship between them. This Introduction provides a synthetic and original guide to this … read more

James I. Porter has been appointed Professor in History and Theory of Rhetoric and will join the department in July of 2015. Prof. Porter has published widely on classical literature and aesthetics, and on Nietzsche. His new book on the Sublime in the Ancient world will be published by Cambridge University Press. Prof. Porter has held appointments at the University of Michigan and University of California, Irvine, as well as visiting positions at Stanford and Princeton.

Many television critics, legions of fans, even the president of the United States, have cited The Wire as the best television series ever. In this sophisticated examination of the HBO serial drama that aired from 2002 until 2008, Linda Williams, a leading film scholar and authority on the interplay between film, melodrama, and issues of race, suggests what exactly it is that makes The Wire so good. She argues that while the series is a powerful exploration of urban dysfunction and … read more

Words can be misspoken, misheard, misunderstood, or misappropriated; they can be inappropriate, inaccurate, dangerous, or wrong. When speech goes wrong, law often steps in as itself a speech act or series of speech acts. Our Word Is Our Bond offers a nuanced approach to language and its interaction and relations with modern law. Marianne Constable argues that, as language, modern law makes claims and hears claims of justice and injustice, which can admittedly go wrong. Constable proposes an … read more

While at a conference at the School of Contemporary Humanities in Zagreb, Croatia, for lectures and a retrospective of her films, Prof. Trinh Minh-ha was awarded The Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award (2014) by the Subversive Festival committee, an annual international fortnight of political, activist, cultural, eduacational, literary and artistic events whose focus this year is on "Power and Freedom in the Age of Control: Networks - Ideology - Alternatives".